The Yuan of a New Day?
Classes and Currencies
by Seth Sandronsky
www.dissidentvoice.org
July 25, 2005

I
read in the morning paper about the People’s Bank of China’s decision to
end its tie of the yuan, the Chinese currency, to the U.S. dollar. The
article mentioned the old and new value of the yuan per dollar. This move,
I read, will make exports from China to the U.S.
more costly. Meanwhile, U.S. exports will become less costly. The new
price of the yuan could make the jobs of U.S. manufacturing workers more
secure, the article noted.

Moreover, the rising
U.S. trade
deficit, the nation’s excess of imports over exports, may be corrected
with the newly priced yuan. Perhaps the U.S. reliance on foreign lenders
that include
China’s
central bank to finance that deficit would fall. Crucially, the millions
of human beings who labor to make the goods that are bought and sold in
China and the US. were faceless and nameless.

Thus the nature of
their working lives did not appear. What these millions of workers with
ideas and personalities do on the job and what their laboring time does to
them is simply not news. What is news is the price of the yuan and the
dollar in relation to the commodities that working people make with their
daily energy to be exchanged in the marketplace.

Since the people who
create the goods for exchange that are priced in dollars and yuans are not
newsworthy in the article I read, one could say the news is really about
China’s place
in the global economy. Yes, and also about the societies of both nations.
What is assumed about the class relations within “communist” China and
capitalist America requires explanation.

In both nations, the
class that calls the shots from the top got there and stays there thanks
to human labor. Such relations can be hard to see by looking at the
surface appearances of the market, or the prices of goods and services
being exchanged. Case in point is children’s toys made by Chinese workers
for Mattel and sold by U.S. workers
employed by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Market competition enforces the class
relations that result in these working folks making and selling such
commodities. Many, however, see only the prices in the marketplace,
including those of the dollar and the yuan.

In the meantime,
there are cheers in the U.S. for the change
of China’s currency from the appointed and elected representatives of the
U.S. upper class -- Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury
Secretary John Snow and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York.
On the surface, these three claim to speak for the national interests of
the U.S. Yet the nation’s populace is hardly in the same boat by any
stretch of one’s imagination.

The lack of economic
security burdening the vast majority of people in the U.S.
is the polar opposite of the massive gains in wealth and income being
amassed by the nation’s moneyed elite, whose interests are looked after by
Greenspan, Snow and Schumer. Thus the price of the Chinese and U.S.
currencies is a distraction of sorts to the expansion of class
consciousness in the global superpower.

The new monetary
policy of Chinese elites means the market will have a bigger effect than
before on yuan’s price. Presumably, the more the market’s influence on a
commodity -- from a currency to a technology -- the better. The less
interference there is for the forces of supply and demand in the
marketplace, the more investment, jobs and output will emerge. If such
market outcomes do not materialize, it is due to deviations from this
model of the marketplace. The market rewards all in the long run. Be
patient. Do not fret.

Well, China’s currency is
a kind of political whipping boy for some of the U.S. upper class. It
seeks to direct popular attention to a foreign location. Against this
backdrop, declining factory employment in the U.S. reflects a trend long
underway by corporations shifting production abroad to super-exploit
foreign workers. On that note, imports made by low-wage workers abroad
have helped to reduce U.S. manufacturing jobs from 828,000 in May 1995 to
258,000 in May 2005. Author Michael Yates further details this process in
his book
Naming the System: Work and Inequality in the Global
Economy (Monthly Review Press 2003).

The curve of history
in which
China’s peasants are becoming factory workers while the U.S.
de-industrializes certainly includes the prices of each nation’s
currencies. Critically, however, working people in each country did not
and do not participate in decisions concerning how and where production of
what they have been and are employed to do. Such social inequality is the
canvas for visions of a new society. Meanwhile, the price of the Chinese
and U.S. currencies is the focus of American officialdom. And as a way to
maintain and increase their class power, who can blame them?

Seth
Sandronsky is a member of Peace Action and co-editor with Because
People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive paper. He can be reached at:
ssandron@hotmail.com.